Hello, in 43 B.C., a year after the assassination of Julius Caesar, a man's severed head and hands were nailed to the speaker's podium of the Roman Senate. They had belonged to Marcus Tullius Cicero, who had risen from humble origins to become one of the most significant political figures in Rome. An advocate by training master orator. His name has become a byword for rhetorical skill and eloquence.
He lived a remarkable life in the dying days of the Republic, but also wrote extensively on rhetorical theory, religion and philosophy. The legacy of his writings on Western education and thought in the Middle Ages was immense. Today, we focussed on his earliest surviving work. DiNunzio name, meaning on Invention, is a treatise on rhetoric written by Cicero as a young man, though criticised by the author later in his life, became one of the most influential books on rhetoric in mediaeval Europe.
With me to discuss Cicero and invention are Terry Hirsch, a recent classics defo graduate of Lincoln College. Alice Hubbard, a third year undergraduate classics student at Corpus Christi College. And Andres Sillett, a lecturer in classical language and literature at Brisbane's College. Thank you for joining me. Andrew, perhaps you could start by putting Cicero in context.
When was he born? Where did he live? Yes. So Marcus Tullius Cicero was born from a humble background, born on a hill town called R.P.M., just out well, quite a bit outside Rome, son of a scholar, I suppose we could call him a man who spent most of his time in libraries, the grandson of a local Roman politician, sorry, a local politician in his Italian town of Domino Bless. Local town councillor. Exactly, yes. Except far more puffed up.
It's a town that has plenty of connexions with Rome. People born there are all citizens. And at the time that Cicero was born there, starting to export their great talents to the city of Rome, people like Marius Grittiness are being sent out to Rome and are started to rise to the political ranks. They're no doubt wanting to harness some of that glory for his own children.
The father of Marcus Tullius Cicero sends his two sons, Knox and Quintus, to Rome to get an education at the house of Crassest, one of the biggest aristocrats of the time. You have to remind me when this was the first century B.C., that 106 B.C. he's born. And in his teenage years, Cicero was sent to Rome to get his education. And what did he learn? What was he being taught? Well, as I'm sure Terry will be able to tell us later, oratory is the absolute backbone of a young Roman male's education.
You learn how to speak. You will be able to succeed in life. Everything in Roman life hinges on your ability to make a good speech, make a persuasive argument that can be speaking in court, that can be persuading a business partner to do something that can be persuaded the whole Senate to go to war. If you can't speak, you can't function in Rome. Perhaps a point worth making on education system is that basically only the upper layer of society gets to rhetorical studies.
The lower class of Roman society, if lucky, would be able to read and write and then something like middle class would make it to what we might call secondary education, where you would learn about the interpretation of the poets and then basically the upper layer of society would go on to rhetorical studies because it's only for people who would enter the profession of advocate and political life, who really need the rhetorical tools to be successful in what they are doing.
So from what it sounds like, Cicero, OK, he wasn't born into the Roman elite, but he still had some influence from his father. And he got, would you say, the best education that could have been got at that time? I think that's very fair to say. Crisis's famous for the number of young people from all backgrounds, but all wealthy backgrounds, whether they've got political forerunners or whether they're Roman businessmen, the wealthy elite are sending their children to classes.
And the sort of child he is producing at the end of this is the sort of person that's going to dominate the Senate and types and types to come. So we've heard this word advocate in the introduction, in his speech, an advocate is what's necessary become. So perhaps we should describe exactly what that is. Alice, I want to come in.
Well, there's a big division between an advocate and a lawyer in the sense that we would think of it in as much as the Roman judicial system, very different from ours, and that there's no Crown Prosecution Service. And as such, if you want a case to be brought, it has to be a very personal issue and done motivated by personal concern or personal grudge provided.
I'm afraid that the position of advocate, therefore, is very much more perhaps what we would think of as a barrister than as a just as a lawyer. They don't ah, they aren't concerned so much with interpretation of the law itself as putting a persuasive case, which is probably what makes retention such an interesting text.
This has actually comparatively little in comparison to Cicero's later oratorio work day or SERTORI than one might expect on linguistic flair and far more on the putting of a case. Well, so thank you very much for that explanation. And you've brought in these two critical works from Cicero's that I suspect will spend most of the rest of the programme talking about. So Diva Journey. It was written quite early in Cicero's life. Went about we think it was written, Terry. We don't know exactly when.
So we can't pin it down to a particular year. And guesses spanned from the late 90s to the late 80s. So if we think of him being born in 106 B.C., he's really very younger than almost all of us around this table. Late teenagers, early, early 20s. Yes, that's very precocious exercise at the age of 16 to sit down and write a handbook to the first stage. But on the other hand, advocates normally appear first in the courts at the age of around 20. So it's a major difference with what we have today.
And in that sense, it's very probable that he wrote this treatise before he had his first major cases. And that's basically the first major case that we know of was in 81 B.C., I think. And so that's a likely date before which it was written. And the latest internal evidence that we have in the invention refers to 94 B.C. So it's very likely that it was written before 94 B.C., 81 B.C., but between after 94. Yes, exactly.
I believe Sisodia comments on the writing of it, saying both that it was written at the time that he was a poor, but also at the time that he was adult sentence, which is two different kind of classes in revenue concerning not really as we would think of adolescence, but that is perhaps the time that you would enter public life in your own right, whereas as a poor you wouldn't. So it's difficult working where the intersection between these two slightly very area.
This information is given by Cicero at the beginning of the Atauro book one. But the context there is that he basically wants to denigrate his youth for the invention. And so the question is whether we can actually use the information of poor versus adolescents less cantaloupe's as referring to precise time spent in his life or whether it was just another a humble brag. Yeah, a trick of Cicero saying, well, although I'm just about to write what will probably be my masterwork.
Actually, when I was very young, I already wrote something, but now I'm much better than everyone else is still writing the sort of book that I was writing when I was young. But I've made some progress since. That territory you wrote in your notes was the next book you wrote about rhetoric, but many years later. Yes. So Delattre probably moisturisers wrong. Harris was written in 55 B.C. and so we've got about 30 years in between where Cicero didn't write any theoretical treatise at all,
neither on rhetoric nor on philosophy. The most probable explanation for that is that he was so busy as an advocate and as a politician that there was just no time and no reason for him to spend time on writing things that not everyone might be interested in and for which you might not be as famous as if you were acting on the forum as an advocate or as a politician.
You can see how philosophical treatise written when you've already made a name for yourself, really just spinning out your fame and a version of writing. You know, it's the sort of equivalent of the paperback autobiography you might see in Smith or, say, Cherie Blair. After the Blair years spinning out the fame she's had in the past.
My friends around the table may disagree with me in this, but personally, I actually think that Cicero is a philosophical writing is really nowhere near as good as his oratorical writing. And it's very I mean, it's very well characterised. It's still very much got the cicerone in flavour in terms of his. He's very moralising, especially in a working day of Vickie's, which is about your kind of duty to your fellow man.
Well, you probably could say that in Cicero later, theoretical works, you always feel the advocate speaking. So he's not a neutral scholar writing about it, but he has strong opinion, popular philosophy written by a an old hag. Like what we also have to bear in mind is basically the rhetorical treatises and the philosophical truths, especially the philosophical treatises. Most people who would be reading such treatises would be able to read the Greek original.
And would need Cicero as a translator in many senses to just refer the content of those books. And so what Cicero is doing is giving his interpretation and his views on those subjects, and he's creating a language in which you can do that. I think that's a very important point to make about Cicero is a philosophical project, is that he's interested in creating a language in which you can talk about philosophy in Latin.
You have to remember that philosophy is an entirely Greek invention at this point. It's based around the Greek language. Plato's dialogues are intensely interested in how the language of Greek, specifically Greek language, can tell you things about the nature of the world. Converting that into another language, the very idea that that could be possible shouldn't be taken as read.
And it's part of Cicero's boast about his command of the Latin language that he can transfer these great concepts out of their native tongue and into Latin. You think of French existential philosophy, for example. So much of it is based, for example, on French puns. To be able to translate the radar into English, you'd have to have enormous command of the French language and of the English language to be able to convey those very lexical ideas in your in a new tongue.
And it's probably thought of in those terms, it's Cicero's way of boasting about his command of the Latin language and of Greek that he can do this and allow other people to take up the torch of. Did he have to invent new Latin words, a new vocabulary to express these great concepts, or did he manipulate everything with what he found? I think what we can say is so clever is that he chose to stay as far as possible away from creating new words.
In many ways, that would be an admission of failure if you have to create a new language to do this, it's about repurposing the words that he has and creating new metaphors for understanding things. One of the big problems that Cicero comes across is that Latin doesn't have a definite article, and so much of platonic thought is about using the definite article to talk about the qualities of things, talk alone, the beautiful thing, the quality of beauty that is in every single thing.
If you try and take that into Latin, you don't have a definite article. How do you do that? Cicero has to go through various metaphors and use abstract nouns, for example, to make that make that work. But he tries to stay as far as possible away from creating new words in a way that would make it look like he's creating a new jargon. I think that's the important thing to say, doesn't create a new job. And he makes it feel like a natural Latin that you would see in a courtroom.
For example, the early attempt to address there's a work by Lucretius, rather, I'm not sure which is an attempt to bring epicurean philosophy into the Roman mainstream. And he's almost evangelical about it as a way of thought, and for that reason presents it in verse, which may seem very idiotic for philosophy, but actually many read it as an attempt to make it attractive reading. But that's not the other.
There's no way to know what Cicero does, but it's part of it as part of a wider tradition of what you what you would call kind of a in society, which is a love in Rome of Greek culture and a once simultaneously not not just not merely to appropriate it, but to develop it further to, as it were, reclaim it of Fantuzzi, I feel with brother ahead of time.
But it's wonderful getting a real sense of perhaps a slightly older Cicero, his advocate style, what he brought to the Roman literature and philosophy. But this is, I think, what he told me earlier, actually quite a different style of thought to what he had much earlier in his life. And so I think it's time to get back to the thing we've been talking around the states. Right. What is this book about theory? This book is basically a rhetorical handbook.
So it's a practical manual doing a theoretical manual. So something which we think is very close to what was actually taught in the rhetorical schools and Rome, although we don't have any concrete evidence of this so that we could see what was really going on inside the schools. And since there was nothing like the Roman syllabus and rhetoric, basically every teacher could more or less define what he would create in the schools.
There were several standard things, but within those rules, you could still add things, leave others out, and also depending basically on the preferences that you would have for certain predecessors, what is Cicero choose to focus on? So the VENTURINI basically was announced as the first part of a major project. So Cicero says that you will treat all the so-called parties artists.
So literal translation would be parts of the art of the theory and which we might rephrase our stages in the composition of a speech. Inventure is the thinking out of the content of your speech. Cicero defines it as follows. Invention is the discovery of valid or seemingly valid points to render once course plausible. So that's basically the first step that you have to make, just thinking what you are going to talk about.
And then the next step would be to arrange all this content for your speech. And then you go on and think about which stylistic level do I want to use and which phrasing do I want to use in certain parts of your speech, then you memorised the whole thing or let's say the the beginning, the end and the most important parts in between. Basically, you just memorise the most important ideas and then basically you improvise around that. And the final step is then basically delivering the speech.
And so the invention is just the first part of a multivolume work which Cicero announced and which he never would write. So he would write the invention. And then basically they have a large project comes to an end and we don't think it's it's lost in translation. You actually think he never wrote it? Well, there are several elements that suggest that he never wrote it. So he doesn't refer to it at all in his later works. We don't know of any other parts, for example, mentioned by Quintillion.
And so it seems very likely that Cicero wrote the invention just before he embarked on his career as an advocate became. Too busy to pursue. That's not a project, and then just give it up for career purposes. It seems almost impossible to imagine that he could have written the whole thing off deep into you on a day, disposition day or not in a day, Memorial Day without quintillion making some reference. That is a later story. And later, he's a professor of rhetoric under treason.
He writes a book that's called Instituto. Or of course, the training of the orator is just impossible to imagine that something like this would be catnip to Quintel. He had written his own institute or stories, then he would be all over it.
In addition to this, it's worth remembering that so much of this Israelian corpus is preserved that it would almost be surprising if we had not only a speech that we didn't have the text of, but also that we have no mention of, given that he's such an important figure in history at the time. We'll talk with Syria a bit more about the detailed structure and content of a different tune. But let's go back to our general chronology of Jethro's life. I think we've left him at around 81.
It's just become an advocate. And there's this one particular case, very famous case, where he makes his name in a big way. Andrew, you want to comment on that? We happy to say. I think we imagine that Cicero has been knocking around the civil law courts at this time, helping out in various cases to do with inheritance or property or trust, etc. The civil law circuit is very different from the criminal law circuit.
Criminal law, as you can imagine, is where you can really let your oratorical fireworks go off. At Cicero, his first big break in the criminal courts is defending a man named Russkis from another Italian small Italian town called Amaria. And Russkis has been a very naughty boy and has been charged with a parasite that is murdering his own father in order to inherit the farms on the basis that he was about to be disinherited.
Cicero very cleverly makes the argument that, in fact, Russkis didn't murder his his father. And in fact, it was the prosecution that people prosecuted for murder were actually responsible for it. And in fact, they'd engaged in some very clever backroom deal to murder Russkis.
His father use the context of the Roman civil war that was boiling away in the background to steal the property of rockiest senior, blame the son for the murder so the son wouldn't come after them to try and get his property back, and then they could retire and live on these lovely country estates in peace.
And according to Cicero, the prosecution were relying on the defence of the dictator Soulas Friedland as one of his ex slaves being behind this whole plot and had all been so scared of this fellow sogginess that no one would dare mention in court the fact that the conspiracy, if you like, went right to the very top. This is like a Watergate style. But the ambitious young Cicero has has the guts to do this.
Well, that's what he tells us. Why? The other way of looking at it is he makes the whole thing up, that this is the ambitious young Cicero is prepared to play with fire in accusing the Friedman of someone like Soula of doing this. So either he's incredibly brave and follows the money right up to the White House and exposes a great corruption. Or he's prepared to make up such a fantastical story that you can't help but notice him in Cicero.
Make sure we know when he writes the speech, says things like, I can see you all looking with open mouths and gasping at the fact that I'm going to mention this, but I'm going to accuse you cry sogginess, point him as being behind this whole plot.
And I think he's relying on the fact that the jury who's going to be made up of senators at this time is the real political elite that these people are going to be so sick of, the injustices carried out under the civil war that they're going to want to get some revenge or get some catharsis,
if you like, for those things later. Maybe we can just save this one person and we can undo some of the injustices by stopping this person suffering the very unusual punishment for parricide, which is to be tied up in a sack, possibly with a snake and thrown in a river. It's potentially worth adding to that a bit about why Cicero had chosen so many hot topics.
Corruption is a big deal for Romans, especially in a period of civil war that oscillates between two political systems, one of complete Republicanism, not perhaps Democratic, entirely democratic Republicanism. As the lack of social mobility means that you cannot to be something, but some sharing of power between power, between organ, of government. Well, the primary organ, a legislative body would be the Senate.
And therefore, the power is, to an extent, in the hands, at least of the political elite rather than one that is an aristocratic aristocratic. Yeah, but that's contrasted with with Sena is the first for a while to bring bring about a state of dictatorship, which is something that Romans absolutely hate because they think that it brings about the hate kings historically and that it brings about potential for a great deal of corruption in their view,
because in Roman politics. To a great extent on the client patron relationship, and if you have, as it were, one super patron who controls through their kind of bounty, I think were all of the political favours descending from them, it means that there's a greater potential than if there were more checks and balances for stuff like this to go unnoticed because the perpetrator of such a deed is high up to someone and say, and so this man, this is the person that Cicero effectively accuses.
Exactly. And he's using his Friedemann. You're accusing him and is very careful to say, I'm not accusing Sollar. I'm accusing the other things.
So Friedemann are also a bit of a nose wrinkling topic for the Roman elite, because because basically because they're not of proper origin, they're not their slaves who have made a lot of money or gained a lot of influence in non-traditional route, as it were, by sort of taking the jobs of the Roman aristocratic sons in that taking almost civil service like positions. What I'm sure we could we could make a whole other of about and go on. But that is so this really makes a big splash.
It makes a big splash. And it's a topic that can twangs so many heart strings that almost the truth of it is less important than its sensationalism. And this sets him on the way until about 20 years later we have him as a as consul. Exactly. So at the same time, he's trying to make his name as the world's best orator. He's also trying to get himself elected into this aristocratic elite that we've been talking about,
very difficult to break into, born into the right family. But Rome is essentially democratic. To get into each magistracy, you have to be elected by the people. So he's standing for election as he goes along using his court cases, his speeches, and call his prosecution, his prosecution of the corrupt governor, various. For example, he set himself up as the man who's going to clean up the the morals of Rome as islands.
And he guarantees his election to one of the more difficult magistracy by using his career. And by 63, P.S., he's reached the pinnacle of that. The highest magistracy of the consulship will leave no religion there and come back to to gionet services 30 years earlier. What's the structure of this work, Gerry? So it comes in two books.
One could superficially perhaps say that the first book contains or the most important decisions and definitions, and that book, too, could be seen as some kind of set of footnotes that expands on what was presented in the first book. So it fills up the gaps that Cicero had to leave out. And because of the restrictions that you had on book writing back then, you didn't have the possibilities of layouts that we have today.
And so basically, you have to think about how you approach breaking down a very complex set of rules into something which you can digest and present in so called voluminous. So basically book role and you have physical limitations of the length. And so part of his style was governed by the publishing. I wouldn't say the style, but it's basically the length, the structure, the. Yeah, exactly. Are the footnotes longer than the book one book two is significantly longer than book one.
So basically if I come to the content of the the two books, both start with Proem and so on, from being a very artful introduction. So in the first Proem, he presents rhetoric combined with philosophy as a major force in the early process of civilisation. So claiming a very big role of rhetoric for mankind is the small claim. In the second book, he talks about why relying on several sources presents many great benefits.
And so it's kind of moving away from the topic of the main part of the work and addressing other issues. So kind of on the philosophical level, which might make us wonder whether this points were really written at the same time as the rest of the work. Now, in two, after the programme, you've got the most fundamental definitions and divisions on which the rest of the work is relying.
So basically, if you don't know anything about rhetoric and if you leave out those passages in the first part of book one, you have very hard time of understanding what's really going on. So that's again about how do you construct a theoretical treatise like that? You have your introduction and then you say, well, I'm now going to give you the most important definitions and how I structure the whole thing.
And after that, saying this is quite a. A formal trial, yes, defining the terms you're going to use and then you go on to develop and you will even notice that throughout McKewon, he's also very formulaic in how he starts and ends each part on certain topic that he's talking about. So basically, for example, he is just finished talking about, say, the narrative. He says, well, that's everything that I've had to say on the topic.
Which one might want to say on this topic? Now I come to the next topic and then he starts with it. And so that helps the reader to see, OK, next chapter logical structure is very clear. Would you call it ever ponderous or does he still have, even as a very young man with the language, let's say today, since we have all these very nice means of layout and so on, where you can really see, OK, now this chapter is over as an entirely new topic that will be addressed in the next paragraph.
You didn't have those divisions in ancient books, and so basically you needed those phrases to indicate that your topic will change now. And so it helps the reader to understand that's a new topic is being introduced. And since you didn't have any clear cut divisions in ancient book rules, let's go back to Cicero's life. And I think it's also time we've been going for nearly half an hour now. We should hear some of his some of his words.
So there are particular series of cases that I can't remember, whether it was Andrew or Alice. You mentioned them earlier from the period between 81 B.C and his consulship in 63 B.C. Do you want to remind us about those? Yes. Yes, happily, yes. Going back to there is the corrupt governor of Sicily. As I think I mentioned earlier, Rome lacks a crown prosecution service and relies on king young men to bring cases against the great criminals.
So one of the charges that Cicero lays against various is that he's been putting Roman citizens to death without trial in order to try and cover up the crimes that he's been committing. And the the conclusion of the speech as he publishes it is a claim that a Roman citizen was crucified without trial.
Crucifixion, as we know from our Bible studies, is that the most shameful death that the Roman authorities could inflict on people, that something that it was absolutely forbidden to inflict on a Roman citizen. If you're a Roman citizen, you have a right not to be executed at all without trial.
But even under the most extreme circumstances, the idea of being nailed to a piece of wood, a Roman certainly now to a piece of wood is the worst thing you could possibly imagine in Cicero uses this to conclude his speech in order to inflame the passions of the jury to convict this man, somebody would do something this barbaric. And I think I was prepared.
I have some kind of bartal wiggers in Medio for Massah Nike with Romanis Uniphase come in today are no skeleton's nula works only Ileus Mzoudi intent on law and capital kiplagat algae bartal Nisse hich Kiwi's Romanos, which translates there in the open marketplace of Messala, a Roman citizen gentleman was beaten with rods and all the while amid the crack of the falling blows, no groan was heard from the unhappy woman.
No words came from his lips in his agony. Except I am a Roman citizen and this is a piece of oratory that was so powerful that when President Kennedy went to visit Berlin at the height of the Cold War, his Ich bin ein Berliner line is a translation of that in the way he introduces the Berliner. Lt is to say there was a time when the proudest boast one could say was he was reminded.
So now the proudest words that can pass the human lips are Ich bin ein Berliner, which it actually means over Queensland's Gulf of Mexico. I find that error in this or in reception that let's face it, I think the final time with time waits for no man. Let's go back to theory, maybe, if anything, about the content and structure of the book that you feel we haven't adequately touched on yet.
But also there's another text on rhetoric for about the same time as David Broder called her a new part of my letter, which has a rather peculiar relationship with importuning. So basically concerning the structure of the invention, as I explained, it only covers the first stage in the composition of a speech. And rhetorical are two random covers, all five stages.
And so in that sense, with regard to running is more complete than the invention for anyone who uses it to get information about the theory of action rhetoric. But for rhetorical invention itself, Cicero's treatise is much more details, much more.
For that purpose, but what's striking is that both works have great similarities in content, food, rhetoric and invention and in many places even similarities or identities in phrasing, which suggests that we've got somehow some at least one or probably several identical sources in the background, either in Latin or Greek and done differently.
Translated What was it? Thought that Cicero wrote both texts. It was considered in late antiquity and the Middle Ages, basically up to the year fourteen hundred and ninety two that both works were about Cicero and called the old and the new rhetoric. And in fourteen ninety two, a humanist from Venice called Ruffa Radius thought that rhetoric at random actually was not by Cicero.
And from that time on we've basically got one of the greatest mysteries of Latin literature and kind of game of identifying what is really going on between the two treatises. So basically, what is their relationship? Because is a is a no decided upon author for attorney for Turgut Iranian. There are some scholars who try to put a name on. It is a Roman rhetorician mentioned by Quintiliano called Koney Figures, who in quintillion presents a couple of points that are similar to at Iranian.
But I'm not exactly what we find in there. So that's basically the best guess that people do. But it's trying to pin a name on a treatise without it really fitting. And also, we don't know that much about iconic figures. Basically, if you put an empty name with a question mark on the treatise, it doesn't really make sense to do that. You send your notes that these two books were kind of a pinnacle of rhetorical teaching in Renaissance Europe.
Exactly. And that was basically due to Cicero's great reputation. The oratorio disappeared in the shadow of the invention and at Iranian because it's more a philosophical discussion about what the idea of an orator and what rhetoric should be like. And so it's not a user friendly manual, if you want, on rhetoric, whereas the Yoona and UDT Iranian are really handbook's on rhetoric, which you can use to get a very quick overlook on the most important concepts in rhetoric.
Alice Hobert, we've left Cicero in 63 B.C., and he lives for about another 20 years and has a rather exciting time of it, both him and Rome. It's a small task, I know, but do you fancy taking us through some of the things that happened to Cicero the later part of his life? Well, I'll give it my best shot. A lot of confusing things is the main answer to that question. But I reckon it's best to begin with his exile.
So his exile is that soon after his consulship, when relatively it really happens, is the result of political changes in Rome more than his activity or his opinions or speeches right at the time was an extreme, a place in extreme turmoil, civil wars, left, right and centre, and many people hoping to use the instability as an opportunity to rise to the top. At the time, a triumvirate was in power of Pompeii, Crassus and Julius Caesar.
They invited Cicero to become the fourth member, but he declined because he disapproved of the triumvirate, because he felt that it took power away from the hands of the people in the Senate, the Cicero, the Republican, the arch Republican. He doesn't approve of any means of removing power from a fully public body. Therefore, he he refuses the offer to become a member of the triumvirate.
Immediately following that, and possibly in response, there is a law put forward, I believe it's a law of 50 B.C. which threatens to exile anybody who has put citizens to death without trial. And that includes Cicero. Does it? Oh, yes. A very a sort of perhaps the part of his history that people don't like to dwell on too much. Cicero, as a result of the Catalan Aryan conspiracy, put people to death without trial.
And this is during his consulship, during his consulship by by the means of his consular power. He was able, though perhaps not quite constitutionally soundly, to put men to death, who he felt had been traitors or proved almost fairly conclusively in his speeches, have been traitors to the republic and hoping to overtake it themselves. So Cicero falls foul of the new political regime and gets exiled.
Antonio Turki's or somewhere, I believe, Macedonia. Let me check that a Thessalonika, which is to me was quite a nice place. I mean, of all the places to be exiled to, but it costs right into an extreme depression at which we can tell from any letters to his friend Atticus about how much he hates being removed from his political intrigues and Rome on his return from exile, he tries to involve himself in the political life of Rome, but with limited success.
He spends more of that time writing philosophy, not especially good philosophy about philosophy and sort of pontificating on various issues and really gets politically involved again in a substantial way after the death of Julius Caesar. This is photophobia, correct? Yes, 44 B.C. is the Ides of March. Julius Caesar is executed. And something which may surprise a lot of listeners is that Cicero claims that this took him entirely by surprise.
The reason this would shock us is that he's incredibly politically involved man in touch with many of the key players in Caesar's assassination and therefore his ignorance of the fact would be surprising, especially because we might imagine that he would actually come down on the side of those assassinating Caesar, disapproving of him as a dictator. Then he gets caught up in the incredibly complicated machinations around the country, second tremor of which I mean, maybe we shouldn't go into.
But he writes a lot of letters. He a lot of less articles about his opinions on the main players in this time. I mean, really, the figures to focus on here is the man who assassinated him eventually, Mark Anthony and Octavia and later known as Augustus, who wins out eventually on the power struggle to begin the Roman Empire. Octavian is an underdog at the beginning. He's the official heir of Julius Caesar, but doesn't know this until the will is read out.
He isn't primed for his position and could easily have seemed, given that he didn't live in Rome and was not especially politically involved at the time, as a bit of a damp squib and certainly perhaps as someone who those more afraid of Roman politics could use as a pawn to bring about the settlement than they wanted using his power as a as a pawn.
Yes. And Cicero is also of this view. He feels that he writes in letters that he thinks that Octavian is naive and yes, could could could be could be used as a puppet, basically, to bring out his ends. And Octavian finds out about this and finds out about this and is understandably not happy. And that information, in fact, should colour our opinion of what happens later. I won't go into the incredibly complex machinations between Antony and Octavian.
All I will say at this stage is that the main reason that Octavian and Antony fight is. Not really because of opposing morals, it's really should be more characterised simply as a power struggle. Both of them have a lot of financial resources and a lot of troops at their disposal, and both want to be number one. And our main source for the history of this time comes from Cicero's is I'm afraid. Yes. I wish that we could say there are other sources as well.
But there's a concern for several of them that they could, in fact, be based on the letters and extrapolating from them because they're written even 200 years after the event themselves. But the alternative here is how lucky it is that Cicero wrote so voluminously it for a lot of that. We might not we might not at all. I mean, we're very lucky to have in some ways the exact opposite in terms of Sourcefire provided for us by the race.
Gasteyer, which is an inscription written by Augustus detailing his achievements over his life and inscribed on his mausoleum. And he discusses this period, but very much paints it as a case of him taking responsibility to write the turmoil of Rome for the sake of the people and then have the power back to them as soon as he has a working constitution in place.
The fact that Rome then descends into empire suggests that this is some whitewashing his role and therefore we need to be careful and definitely use the sources against each other to sort of provide a less spun view of what happens. So Cicero doesn't have the financial resources, the army of my country, of taking these major players in the civil war, but of course, he's trying to exercise what power he has.
How does he try and do this the way Cicero always tries and does that, which is why oratory, he goes back to the Senate and a number of extremely powerful speeches.
In fact, I think they're often considered some of the most florid work in the Cicerone and Corpus are issued to the Senate known as the Phillips collectively, which is a pun really well, as close as Classics gets on a series of speeches given by DeMott Sunnis against a citizen called Philippa's in Athens, the content of the speeches is to persuade the Senate to try and declare Antonya Hostis that is a public enemy and bar him from the state. It doesn't work, is the short answer.
It doesn't work at all, especially because Octavian around this time gets wise to Cicero's attempts to play him and actually reconciles with Antony. Which leads to the foundation of the third triumvirate, the third member of this being Lepidus, who doesn't doesn't do a huge amount but still ought to be recognised the nature of triumph, which is really that it's a dictatorship with three people. That should be No. Two views about that. It doesn't refer power back to the Senate in any way.
And as a result of this power, what the three men choose then to do is a system of prescription where they basically write down the name of anybody that's been nasty to them and kill them, simple, simple and sometimes effective. And sadly, Cicero goes down on this list for, well, the extreme polemic that he used against Anthony. I don't think I'd be happy to be the person condemned in those speeches.
But it's actually said that the Octavian, despite being played by Cicero, despite discovering what Cicero said about him in the early days of his ascent onto the power scene in Rome, actually argued for two days against Cicero, his name being on this list, but he lost the battle being at that stage very much the junior partner in this alliance. And he got his way and he got his way and the rest we've discussed.
Three minutes left, I think we should talk about sectionally. I think we should I think it's John King. It has been so far. I think one that you can say about, however interesting, the bare bones of rhetorical teaching might be, the exciting things this room could put them to a kid could put them to useful is amazing. One of my personal favourite speeches is the pro bono. And I'm hoping that Alice, somewhere in her laptop, will have a quote from this.
It's a case that Cicero delivers a defence of a young man who's accused of beating up some Egyptian ambassadors and murdering and murdering them rather than confront any of the facts of this murder case that he's involved with. Cicero decides that the way to get ideas off is to distract the jury by talking about an illicit love affair, to throw dust in the jury.
Exactly. To kick the dust in their eyes. So Circumciser, talk about an affair this young man had with a very posh, recently widowed lady who just happened to be the sister of his great enemy just happened. So this is a passage in which he cast suspicion on the woman and on the grounds of her affair with coleus, in which he feels that this was very much taking advantage of Wikinews and Scantlin aspects. Kandel who tear at procurators, Walters', Okalik, Pull-Out, Cyprus.
We Daddy. What are we waiting for? Westing unknown. Come in is DeMatteis with Nobilis Mulya Illum Filion Familias parklet Parker Akton Akihabara to his copy's de Wigton non-partisan Kalki Tratt rest Bulleit Noncommutative Tona 2R Donna Saitoti Konforti Allio which translates itself as a neighbour. A young man caught your eye, his beauty, his tall figure, his looks and eyes took you by storm. You wanted to see him often. You were sometimes with him in the same parks.
You are a great lady and by your wealth you want to keep hold of a young fellow who has a mean and niggardly father. You cannot do it. He kicks. He treats you with contempt. He does not think your gifts are worth so much. Take yourself off somewhere else. So he wasn't afraid of an ad hominem attack.
Oh, really? No, he he can do it. He continues against Claudia Claudia Martelly, who's also thought to be the subject of some poem by Catullus, the famous Lesbia, his lover, and therefore a somewhat notorious woman on the romance scene at the time. I suppose you can make this the case by saying that she is related to the people who are bringing the prosecution against it.
So if we think back to Cicero getting Roski as often his first case, I suggest that the people who are prosecuting him are actually responsible for this by denigrating Clojure in this way. Cicero suggesting it's all a put up job, that she's just jealous of him breaking off the relationship. And if we move quickly to the death of Cicero was going to say so. So it's right on time, but it comes to a sticky end. He comes to kill because of exactly things like this.
And as you say, his head is taken back to Rome after it's chopped off for writing too many cruel speeches against Marc Anthony. And one gruesome detail of his death is that his head was brought to Marc Anthony, his wife, who'd be assailed in these speeches, and that she took her wig pins out and stabbed his tongue for delivering these speeches against it. So it's exactly things like what else has been reading out of that book? Make Friends, I'll quote.
Thank you, author. It's been a fascinating forty five minutes. We could spend a whole day talking about other aspects of Cicero's life and his work. That's where we've had time for next week. We'll be talking about mediaeval troubadours plenty.